The Balkans

A Post-Communist History

Robert Bideleux, Ian Jeffries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415229630
• eBook ISBN: 9781134583270
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

An excellent companion volume to the successful A History of Eastern Europe, this is a country-by-country treatment of the contemporary history of each of the Balkan states: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosova.

With a distinctive conceptual framework for explaining divergent patterns of historical change, the book shifts the emphasis away from traditional cultural explanations and concentrates on the pervasive influence of strongly entrenched vertical power-structures and power-relations.

Focusing on political and economic continuities and changes since the 1980s, The Balkans includes brief overviews of the history of each state prior to the 1980s to provide the background to enable all students of Eastern European history to make sense of the more recent developments.

1 Conceptual frameworks

‘The Balkans’ and the nature of post-Communist democratization and economic transformations

This book describes, analyses and assesses the history, accomplishments, problems and challenges of the post-Communist states in the Balkan Peninsula. In order to ‘set the scene’ and establish an overarching framework for our country studies, this Introduction briefly assesses (i) what does and does not constitute ‘the Balkans’; (ii) the place of the Balkan Peninsula in Europe; (iii) the nature, context and trajectories of democratization and liberalization in the post-Communist Balkan states; and (iv) the nature of the economic transformations in the post-Communist Balkans. The Introduction concludes with brief explanations of our selective coverage of the history of the Balkans prior to the 1990s and of the reasons for our omission of Greece and Slovenia from this book.

What does and does not constitute ‘the Balkans’

This book endeavours to use the expression ‘the Balkan Peninsula’ in a culturally neutral territorial or geographical sense to refer to a particularly rugged and mountainous promontory jutting out south-eastwards from Europe, which is itself merely a peninsular appendage to the vast Eurasian landmass. Nevertheless, we are fully aware that the words ‘Balkan’ and ‘the Balkans’ are heavily laden with multiple cultural meanings, connotations and stereotypical images, that some of these meanings and images are quite rightly considered to be demeaning, condescending, derogatory or at best ambiguous, and that the terms ‘Balkan’ and ‘the Balkans’ are therefore by no means fully accepted by this peninsula’s inhabitants. These people understandably feel even less happy with the more obviously pejorative uses of the term ‘Balkanization’. This has come into widespread use to signify the onset of endemic propensities towards highly debilitating (and often self-perpetuating) political, cultural and socio-economic fragmentation, deeply destructive and often fratricidal inter-communal conflict, political destabilization, intemperate or intolerant attitudes and mentalities, pervasive clientelism and corruption, a preponderance of relatively oppressive vertical power relations and power structures, weak development of the rule of law, stunted development of impersonal horizontally structured ‘civil’, legal and ‘associational’ ties and relationships, the exercise of unstable and strongly personalized power and influence, a prevalence of polities with strong coercive but weak ‘infrastructural’ capabilities and widespread feelings of victimization, vindictiveness and fatalism. There are some limited respects in which the term ‘Balkanization’ is illuminating and helpful, but we fully recognize that it can also be used in unwarrantedly pejorative or dangerously misleading senses, from which we wish to dissociate this book at the outset.

Even though our attraction to and high regard for the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula has encouraged both of us to devote more than thirty years of our working lives to studying them, we sadly accept that the concept of ‘Balkanization’ does convey some significant aspects of the predicaments in which the peoples and polities on this peninsula have had the misfortune to find themselves since the nineteenth century (Bideleux and Jeffries 1998: 2–7, 25–8, 37–41 and 97–108). At the same time, we emphasize that this is not the whole story and that the notion of ‘Balkanization’ is fraught with dangers of crude and highly misleading cultural stereotyping and national caricatures. This book is highly critical of the often crude, arrogant and profoundly ignorant generalizations about so-called Balkan ‘mentalities’, ‘attitudes’ and ‘mindsets’ which emanate mainly (though not exclusively) from Western observers. It has been all too easy for outside observers to consider ‘Balkanization’ to be a congenital condition of the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula and, by attributing it to innate or genetically determined ‘Balkan’ characteristics and mentalities, to succumb to facile and fatalistic assumptions that the inhabitants of this peninsula are somehow incapable of thinking and behaving in more peaceful and ‘civilized’ ways. Assumptions of this sort have underlain most Western and Central European perceptions of politics and conflict in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century. Such perceptions were strongly aroused for the first time by the so-called ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ of April 1876, when irregular forces known as bashibazouks in the service of the Ottoman Empire were accused of having killed around 5,000 Bulgarian Christians (mainly women and children), many of whom were burned alive in a church in which they had taken refuge (Crampton 1997: 81–2). These perceptions were reinforced by the grisly murder of the King and Queen of Serbia during a military coup d’état in 1903, and were strengthened still further by the gruesome atrocities that armed combatants in the Balkan Peninsula inflicted on many thousands of civilians during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, during the First and Second World Wars, during the aftermaths of those wars, during the Yugoslav conflicts of 1991–5, and in Kosova in 1999. There is no denying that such actions were extremely barbaric and shocking. Nevertheless, the often prurient Western accounts of such terrible occurrences too easily portray them as peculiarly ‘Balkan’, ‘alien’, ‘other’, ‘un-European’ and even exotic and ‘Oriental’, apparently forgetting that similar or far greater atrocities have been committed more than once in twentieth-century Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, to name only the most obvious cases, and that (appalling though they were) all such occurrences in the Balkan Peninsula were dwarfed by the scale of the barbarism and atrocities committed by hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans and their mostly Austrian, French, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, Baltic, Hungarian, Croat, Romanian, Ukrainian and Belorussian collaborators against millions of (mostly but not exclusively Jewish and Gypsy) civilians during the Second World War. This is not said in order to excuse or play down in any way the many barbarities committed by inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula, but simply to keep things in perspective and to emphasize that the latter have no monopoly on barbarism, ethnic cleansing and genocide, which need to be seen as products of broader ‘European’ rather than narrowly ‘Balkan’ ‘civilization’. Western and Central Europeans have no grounds whatsoever to feel either morally superior to, or more ‘civilized’ than, the inhabitants of the Balkans. Rather than being fundamentally ‘alien’ or ‘essentially different’, the post-Communist Balkans have been a microcosm of Europe as a whole and a very revealing mirror in which Western and Central Europeans have been uncomfortably reminded of the dangerous currents of xenophobia, bigotry, inter-communal violence and racist violence which still lurk not far below the surface in their own societies and cultures. As Mohandas Gandhi famously replied to the Western journalist who asked him ‘What do you think about Western civilization?’, ‘That would be a good idea!’. The perverted, sadistic and degrading acts of barbarity committed by some Western soldiers against Iraqi detainees in 2003–4 are merely the most recent proofs of his point.

In using the expressions ‘the Balkans’ and ‘Balkan’, therefore, this book is in no way suggesting that the peoples, states and societies of the Balkan Peninsula are morally or culturally ‘inferior’ to the peoples, states and societies of Western and Central Europe, nor that the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula are more culturally conditioned or genetically programmed to kill one another than are their Western or Central European ‘cousins’. Quite the contrary, although Balkan strife is still fresh in the memory, in a slightly longer historical time-frame, the scale of the ethnic cleansing, genocide and wanton killing carried out in the Balkan Peninsula has been utterly dwarfed by the scale of similar types of atrocity perpetrated in many other parts of Europe since the late Middle Ages. Indeed, for all its arrogance and ill-founded conceits, no other part of the world has been more prone to racism, bigotry and violent inter-communal conflict than Europe.

The main practical reason why this book refers to this peninsula as ‘the Balkans’ is that this is the name that most immediately and precisely conveys to most people the region under discussion. If a less loaded but generally recognized collective designation for these countries were available, that would be used instead. The principal problem with the more neutral-sounding designation ‘South-eastern Europe’ (which some writers prefer precisely because they think it has fewer negative connotations; e.g., Lampe 2006) is that it refers to a much larger area which commonly includes Turkey, Cyprus and Moldova and ought also to include Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine. Another problem (albeit largely ignored in the West) is that the term ‘South-eastern Europe’ (Südosteuropa) ‘became an important concept in the geopolitical views of the Nazis’, which resulted in ‘the complete discrediting of this term in its German usage’ (Todorova 1997: 28).

In any case, it ought to become possible to use ‘the Balkans’ not as a pejorative term, but as one which encapsulates much that is positive, beautiful, inspiring, admirable, vibrant and exciting, even though many of the region’s strengths, virtues and cultural achievements have not yet gained as much international recognition as they deserve. In so far as this book uses the term ‘the Balkans’ in something more than the purely geographical sense, it is in predominantly positive and admiring ways. Other valuable discussions of ‘Balkanism’ and ‘Balkanness’ include: Maria Todorova (1997), Dusan Bjelic and Obrad Savic (eds) (2002), Vesna Goldsworthy (1998), Milica Bakic-Hayden (1995) and John Allcock (2000a).

The relative standing of the Balkan Peninsula in Europe

The Western European Industrial Revolution, coupled with Balkan and East European specialization in the exportation of unsophisticated and less remunerative primary products, widened Europe’s east–west disparity in per-capita GDP (at market prices) from about 2:1 to about 3:1 during the nineteenth century (Berend 1986: 339). By 2004, these economic disparities had widened enormously, to a ratio of around 14:1 or 15:1 (at market prices) for Albania and Bosnia, 1:13 for Macedonia, 12:1 for Serbia and Montenegro, 11:1 for Bulgaria, 10:1 for Romania and 1:5 for Croatia (World Bank 2005: 292–3). Therefore, unless Western Europe were to suffer some currently unforeseen catastrophe, these massive east–west economic disparities are bound to persist for another 50 to 100 years from now. This would be the case even if the Balkan economies were to grow by historically exceptional rates of 5 or 6 per cent per annum for several decades to come.

Substantial reductions of the huge east–west economic disparities which currently exist will take even longer if the Balkans continue to be dogged by the recurrent warfare and political and economic crises which they repeatedly experienced during the twentieth century. Of course, we fervently hope that such crises and warfare will not recur. Unfortunately the odds are strongly stacked against a prospectus of continuous peace and economic growth. As the International Commission on the Balkans rightly warned in its powerful report on The Balkans in Europe’s Future (April 2005), the post-Communist Balkan states are currently grappling with mass poverty, very extensive unemployment and under-employment, severely damaged social fabrics, glaring inequalities, seriously restricted mobility and (most alarmingly of all) major criminal gangs and networks which engage in widespread racketeering and have a powerful hold on large parts of these economies and societies and even on parts of their security forces, judiciaries and political systems. These countries are in part being ‘held captive’ by organized crime and various forms of racketeering, and they desperately need sustained external help in order to break free from their mostly quite ruthless and dangerous captors. Furthermore, the foreseeable future is still fraught with dangers of renewed economic breakdown, societal breakdown, political instability and violent inter-ethnic or inter-state conflict.

The economic benefits from the major externally funded reconstruction programmes which were launched in the aftermath of the conflicts in Croatia and in Bosnia between 1991 and 1995 and following the Kosova war in March–June 1999 had run their course by 2003 or 2004. Much of the damage to physical infrastructure had been repaired, and the temporary (artificial) economic stimuli by reconstruction work and by new inflows of economic aid were beginning to dry up. Unemployment rates, which fell temporarily during the reconstruction booms, then started rising again – to official rates exceeding 30 per cent in Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia and exceeding 50 per cent in Kosova. In addition, it was becoming much harder for unemployed and impoverished inhabitants of the Balkan states and the Kosova protectorate to escape to other parts of Europe as refugees, asylum-seekers or economic migrants. The very fact that the fighting in the Balkans had at least temporarily stopped made it harder for inhabitants of the post-Communist Balkan states to claim refugee or asylum status in European Union (EU) states, and increasing xenophobia and rising restrictions on migration into EU states were having a similar effect. In addition, many hundreds of thousands of refugees and economic migrants from the Yugoslav successor states, Kosova and Albania either returned voluntarily or were sent ‘back home’ after the fighting stopped. Partly for these reasons, the hitherto relatively large inflows of remittances from Yugoslavs, Kosovars, Albanians and other displaced persons and economic migrants working in Western Europe and North America began to diminish and were expected to fall even further. The International Commission on the Balkans therefore rightly warned that the economic recovery which had begun in the later 1990s and resumed after the Kosova crisis might not be sustained and could even go into reverse and that mass poverty, mass unemployment, glaring inequalities, organized criminal racketeering and restricted mobility, along with the resultant loss of hope for future improvement in these harrowing conditions and uncertainties about the future status of Kosova, Montenegro and the Bosnian confederation, could easily reignite the kinds of inter-ethnic and inter-state conflict and intra-state insurgency that struck the Balkans in 1991–5, 1998–9 and 2001. These sobering perspectives were backed up by the International Crisis Group and other professional ‘watchers’ of the Balkans. Therefore, even though the major insurgency in Macedonia in 2001 was followed by several years of relative tranquillity in the Balkans, there were no grounds for complacent optimism regarding the future of the Balkans. We return to these themes in Chapter 11.

Explaining divergent patterns of post-Communist democratization and liberalization

Since the end of Communist rule, the most crucial political and economic challenges in East Central Europe, the Balkans and in the CIS (the Commonwealth of Independent States, alias ‘Eastern Europe’) have been to break away from the primacy of ‘vertical’ power relations, ‘vertical’ power structures, ‘ethnic collectivism’ and often gangsterish ‘power clans’ based upon large-scale and clientelistic use of patronage and corruption, in order to establish more ‘horizontally structured’ civil societies and civil economies based upon the rule of law. Changes of this order have been needed in order to lay the indispensable foundations for more liberal, accountable and law-governed forms of democracy and market economy. Such changes can be characterized most graphically (and in a nutshell) as shifts from vertically to horizontally structured polities, economies and societies.

The widely differing degrees and trajectories of post-Communist democratization and liberalization, as well as the major impediments to such changes (especially in the Balkans and in the CIS), have widely been explained and portrayed in cultural or so-called ‘civilizational’ terms – that is to say, in terms of attitudes, mentalities, mindsets, value systems and religious-cum-political cultures. For example, in a widely acclaimed study of the illiberal yet elective regime maintained by Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia from 1987 to 2000, Lenard Cohen has argued that Milosevic’s

political ascendancy and consolidation of power depended primarily on factors having more to do with the cultural underpinnings, rather than the structural features, of the Serbian polity . . . Although it is analytically difficult, even dangerous, to extrapolate from . . . the historically conditioned Serbian mindset directly to contemporary and current political dynamics, the importance of cultural factors in understanding Serbian politics should not be ignored . . . Indeed, while enthusiasm for ‘instinctive democracy’, ‘self-determination’, and ‘democratic participation’ are often noted as major components of the Serbian ‘national character’, historically Serbian political culture placed even more emphasis on the value of strong leaders . . . who can pursue the community’s national mission . . . Deeply engrained facets of Serbian political culture clearly provided especially fertile soil for Milosevic’s populist leadership style and appeal.

(Cohen 2002: 128)

It is easy to find similar emphases on nationalism and illiberal ‘political cultures’ as the chief determinants of political, societal and economic outcomes in many other recent studies of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Albanian, Romanian and Bulgarian politics and history, as also for Russia, Belarus, Moldova the Caucasus and Central Asia.

1.1 Key economic statistics, 2004

For purposes of comparison:

However, our thirty or more years of research on political and economic change in the post-Communist Balkans, East Central Europe and Russia have revealed fundamental flaws and inadequacies in this influential but misleading emphasis on the allegedly pivotal importance of ‘political culture’, ‘mindsets’ and popular ‘attitudes’ and ‘mentalities’ as major explanatory factors or independent variables. In our view (which has elements in common with the work of some other Balkan specialists, such as V. P. Gagnon and Eric Gordy), such explanations implicitly or explicitly rely on caricature and cultural stereotyping as substitutes for more concrete and circumspect observation and analysis. Protracted study of each of the post-Communist Balkan states has convinced us that attitudes, mentalities and mindsets are for the most part highly malleable and manipulable dependent variables, rather than determining independent variables, and that they change over time in response to changes in power relations, power structures and resultant behavioural incentives and opportunities. We have found that (i) the impediments to – and the differing degrees and trajectories of – democratization and liberalization can be much more concretely and cogently explained in terms of prevailing power relations and power structures, including the influence of ‘ethnic collectivism’ understood more as a power structure than as a mentality; and (ii) the incidence of vertically structured power relations and power structures does not neatly correspond to cultural or supposedly ‘civilizational’ demarcation lines, but rather cuts across them.

In the East Central European states that joined the EU in May 2004, the struggles to fulfil the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ and ‘Madrid criteria’ for EU membership helped to foster growing cross-party consensuses on macro-economic policies, privatization, restructuring of institutions and industries, judicial and legal reform and promotion and protection of human and minority rights, which in turn helped to promote the rule of law, equal citizenship (equal civil rights and equality before the law), political stability, democracy and the development of more ‘level playing fields’ and more fully marketized and liberalized economies. This in turn helped slowly to restructure and reorientate these candidate countries away from the prevalence of ‘vertical’ power relations and power structures, from the primacy of ‘primordial’ ethno-cultural ties, and from clientelistic and ‘ethnic collectivist’ conceptions of the polity, towards stronger horizontally structured impersonal ties and civil societies and civil economies based upon the rule of law. This was inherently complex and far from easy to accomplish, but it has nevertheless been accomplished to remarkable degrees. It was implicitly on this basis that it was decided at Copenhagen in December 2002 to let them enter the EU in May 2004.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of the Kosova war of March–June 1999, and reinforced by the formal pledge given at the Thessaloniki European Council in 2003, the ‘dangled carrot’ of eventual EU membership has been giving the formerly Communist-ruled Balkan countries powerful incentives and political leverage to carry out similar but very difficult changes. This is probably the main reason why such changes have latterly made much more headway in the Balkans than in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet republics other than the Baltic states), which have thus far been given few grounds for hoping that they can realistically aspire to eventual membership of the EU. The EU is therefore having much less impact on the post-Soviet CIS than on the Balkan states. This is strongly reinforced by the fact that the Balkan states are much closer to the EU and a great deal smaller than countries such as Russia and Ukraine. Any given amount of EU economic aid and political leverage can have far greater effects on the mostly very small Balkan states than it can on the vastness of Russia or even on Ukraine.

The main impediments which have damaged and constrained the democratization and liberalization of the post-Communist Balkans states, seriously delaying their admission into the EU, have been the closely inter-linked legacies of deeply entrenched ‘vertical’ power structures, ‘vertical’ power relations, ethnic collectivism and pervasive ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Conceptual frameworks
• 2 Albania
• 3 Bulgaria
• 4 Romania
• 5 Croatia
• 6 Serbia
• 7 Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 8 Macedonia
• 9 Montenegro
• 10 Kosova
• 11 The post-Communist Balkans, the West and the EU
• Bibliography